Can Beauty Save the World? Come and See

The upcoming winter/spring edition of the Front Porch’s “Public House Church” (aka, Pub Church) explores Dostoevsky’s compelling, though enigmatic assertion that “beauty will save the world.” Beauty that takes our breath away opens our hearts. And once our hearts open — in that very instant! — we see the world and everything in it as beautiful. This is the beauty that will save the world, and we will talk about all this from multiple perspectives through the eyes of distinguished guests and artists over the next five months at Scholz Garten on Sunday evenings.

The kind of beauty we’re interested in “unlocks the yearning of the human heart, the profound desire to know, to love, to go towards the Other, to reach for the Beyond” (Benedict 16, 2009). In our distracted world, where there can be much banality, boredom, and ugliness, we need beauty. To be cut off from beauty is to fall into egoism, desiccation, and cowardice. By transfiguring our own vision through the power of co-creative attention giving, we can begin to see as God sees. And God sees the world and each of us in it as beautiful. In the Genesis story of creation, the Hebrew word for good may also be translated as beautiful—“And God saw that it was beautiful.”

We’re thus creating the space for epiphanies of beauty to happen on Sunday evenings. We’re hoping to offer those of us feeling hemmed in by our overly instrumental and fragmented culture the chance to expand our horizons, to connect with others, and to transform our vision of the world. When Mother Teresa saw the mutilated bodies and souls of the dying poor in Calcutta as beautiful, she wasn’t being irrational or sentimental—her vision had been transfigured and she saw clearly, as God sees.

What is beauty? Well…it’s particular, dialogical, vulnerable, surprising, insightful, simple, complex, gracious, generous, alive, organic, transcendent, agile and nimble. Beauty connects, wounds, disrupts, overpowers, delights, terrifies, and heals. Can beauty save the world? I guess that depends on how we see. Come and see with us beginning January 15th!